Read here the full transcript of psychotherapist Tasha Jackson’s talk titled “Can We Not Let Our Breakups Break Us” at TEDxCSULB 2020 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
I want you all to know that you are loved because today we can be surrounded by so many people but feel profoundly alone. 68% of Gen Z feels like nobody knows them. The average American only has one close friend, and one in four feels like they have no one. Loneliness is on par, if not worse than our health, than obesity. It strips years from our life.
So we brush off this need for human connection, especially after a breakup, right? We say, “I just want to be alone. I can’t take this heartache.” But we can and we must because these connections are the keys to our happiness. And the ultimate disconnection of breakup, that can trigger violence, substance use, and depression.
So how do we stay connected and not let breakups break us?
About the Speaker
I’m a psychotherapist, and I am a proud mom of two. There they are, so cutie pies. I am an HSP, which is called a highly sensitive person. I’m a category four dyslexic. That’s not a professional term, that’s my own term. Things get jumbled up with my dyslexia in my head and coming out of my mouth.
So despite my Star Trek outfit, I do not, and my Britney Spears thing, I do not feel comfortable up here. But I feel calling because we are in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. With my work, I’ve come to know loneliness on a first name basis. And here people, what feels like eternity for them sync with heartbreak. And I take my work extremely seriously, but today, as we go down this journey, I want to have a little fun, make this a little bit more digestible.
The Impact of Breakups
So how do we currently handle breakups? Well, you may feel like hiding and hibernating underneath your sheets. You may feel like a semi truck came and ran right over you, and reversed and ran right back over you. You may feel body parts you didn’t know existed in your body.
My clients have found meaning with the symbolic, symbolic meaning with their physical pain, say their stomach hurts at the core, they can’t digest what’s happening. Their eye twitches, “I don’t want to see what’s going on.” And whether this symbolism resonates with you or not, know that trauma can be held on a cellular level.
But maybe you’re not thinking that far ahead. Maybe you’re just wiping away on your screen or screens, and feelings of inadequacy hit your own mental feed, like the universal fear that you’re not enough. You’re never going to find love. You can’t commit, and your eggs are going to rot.
The Role of Friends and Culture
And your friends try, they tell you all your ex-sucks, and whatever gender they were, that whole gender sucks. And they tell you that you could do better, because that one always feels good, and take you out for an obligatory drink, or four. And because you made that great post, you’ll get a barrage of emotional support through a bunch of memes for one day, because nothing feels like you’re going to find love again and vulnerability like this.
Your friends really do try. But the problem is, our culture has no rituals around mourning love, heartbreak. You’re kind of on your own.
The Brain’s Response to Breakups
But your own brain isn’t helping you either. You’re used to being intoxicated by this love hormone called oxytocin that made you feel like a goddess. And now you’re going through withdrawals. You’re jonesing for it. Your logic’s all over the place.
Second, you’re probably having some stress hormones like cortisol flooding your brain, and it’s making you feel like you’re having an out-of-body experience, similar to how I am on the stage right now.
Third, your brain is really trying to help you. It’s searching for dopamine hits here and there, online shopping, whole pint of ice cream, wine, wine, and more wine. I don’t recommend this.
Our minds are like a chia pet for fear. You drop it one little fear, and it wants to grow up into a beanstalk of terror.
This fear-based thinking served us really well when we were hunters and gatherers, and we needed to avoid the buffalo stampedes or the locust invasions. But we haven’t evolved. We are stuck with a mind that is more receptive to fear than how sexy we look in a loincloth.
Coping Strategies
So what are we supposed to do? First, control what you can control, which is often with your body. Eat, sleep, drink, deep breathe the best you can right now. Get present by using all five of your senses. Now high-intensity cookie eating is not exercise. Sorry. Try to create healthy rituals for yourself, like a morning walk with music. Find your inner diva, your inner thrash metal head, or whatever it’s called. Get your broken heart pumping.
Now when I was younger, I was asked to be part of a TV pilot for a show that talked about social issues in a hot tub. Now if this sounds bad, it was really bad, especially being in a hot tub for so long. For your pleasure and mine, embarrassment, here you go.
[Video clip description]
Now I just don’t show you this just to embarrass myself, but my clients feel guilty for having a pity party in a hot tub after a breakup, but don’t feel bad for feeling sorry for yourself. Loss is painful, so validate that pain. Tears literally have stress hormones in them, so cry them out. Let yourself be human.
But at some point and on some level, you need to start functioning again, so think of it like a hot tub. Get in, get out. Don’t do bad TV pilots.
The Complexity of Mourning Love
Now mourning love is such a strange state, isn’t it?
One minute you’re telling each other your deepest secrets, and the next, you’re strangers, and that is brutal. You can swing with feelings of sadness and numb and anger and strange relief, all vacillating at warp speeds.
You may mourn the relationship before it’s over. You may mourn the relationship that you thought it was or who you thought they were or the shared history. You may mourn the future that you’d hoped to have with them or how this may affect other people.
And part of letting go can be seen if there’s anything worth grabbing onto. But I warn you of nostalgia. Nostalgia is two-faced, and its shtick is to paint forgeries of the past and whitewash your memories like a propaganda movie. And then you hear it whisper, “Was it so bad?” And then you’ve got your hand over the panic mode and go, “What if I changed and he changed, and maybe if we tried a little bit harder, we could make it work.”
But know that you are doing all the messy feelings of mourning love to get to the place of acceptance. And it’s not that you approve it or like it. It’s just coming to terms with what is.
And I say all this, and mourning is individual. There’s no recipe. There’s no timeline. And just when you think you’ve gone so far, whoop, you are back to square one again.
But please don’t let it stop you from feeling all these feelings, because if you stuff this all these feelings down like a Thanksgiving dinner, that dry-tasting bird that I swear nobody likes on any other day is going to come manifesting itself up in destructive actions or lashing at the people that you love.
Or maybe you’ll be 65 in some crummy bar on a Tuesday with smoke in your face.
Counteracting Nostalgia and Setting Boundaries
So you need to create a counterattack to nostalgia. Write down all the reasons the relationship’s not working. Give it to your friends. Review it often. Play out the whole unsulfying movie, not just the highlights.
Now you’re going to want to build and have a fortress. You’re going to want to have some firm boundaries with your ex, whether you like them or they understand. Because the next minute you’re creeping online, looking at your ex. I mean, you are curious. And you happen to accidentally see a photo of him with a woman. And maybe analyze it for a few minutes, I mean all day. And you’re right back in your recovery cocoon, and it was only his cousin.
Rituals for Change
Experiment with rituals that signify change. If you ask me, take a playbook from Burning Man. Gather all the things that they left at your place and didn’t pick up, and you couldn’t sell on Craigslist. Gather your friends, have a bonfire, and burn it.
I realize most of us are not into pyromania, but I want you to not discount the power of a collective emotional experience, sort of like what we’re having right now. Or take my friend’s mantra, “New relationship, new bedsheets.” I know it’s not the sheet’s fault, it’s symbolism.
But whatever you do, do not let fear light your path. Fear is a horrible advisor. Our brain acts like a conspiracy theorist to anything positive. It starts to come in, you see some hope, and it wants to poke holes in that theory. But don’t you let it. Run it through your senses. Visualize it, feel it, smell it. Just try to give it a sense, try to give it a chance to stick.
Rebound Relationships
Now I’ve always loved this lyric, and I believe Dolly Parton said it first. “The best way to get over a lover is to get under another.” Now that feels good, but is there any science behind this? Actually, yes. Thank you Journal of Social and Personal Relationships for showing us that a rebound relationship can help us improve our overall health quicker, fantastic.
But be careful of their heart and your heart, as you may not be ready to be ghosted after a one-night stand, or any relationship for that matter. But who knows when Cupid will strike again, right?
The Importance of Staying Connected
Resist going into that hibernation cocoon. Duct tape that little voice inside that says, “Being social is too much effort.” If you feel like you’re a burden to your friends, ask them. Don’t assume and rob them of this gift to be close to you. It could be the silver lining to all of this.
You may want your ex to understand what’s going on for you right now, but I want you to remember that you may not be together because you didn’t understand each other. So find somebody who can, because this could be an opportunity for deeper healing.
Many psychotherapists believe that we enter a relationship to heal for things in our past, and a breakup alone can trigger loss, abandonment, trust issues. So maybe not go to the person who broke your heart to try to mend it.
Self-Compassion and Reframing
Guilt and regret can eat us alive. But my guess is somebody with the same history as you, put in the same situation, probably would have done the same thing. And we cannot predict how we will feel with accumulation of time. So please practice self-compassion. And it’s not just a magic pill you take once, it’s a lifetime practice.
And at the end of the day, we’re all just evolving, apparently even the royal family. So many of us judge the success of a relationship by its length. If it doesn’t go to the grave, another failed relationship. Not necessarily. What if we redefined or reframed failed as completed?
We have this idea that all endings are so negative. But if we peel this back a little bit more, we are pretty darn thankful for some expiration dates, puberty, pimples, period, hell yeah. So what if we thought of heartbreak as just part of the flow of life, just part of being alive?
Personal Experience
That’s an X. Let’s talk about him. I had a relationship that probably should have never lasted past the first date. Probably all of us have. I had just moved to San Francisco, and I was lonely, and I’m a toll sucker for creative smart men with silky black names.
Fast forward five years, and I was a fragment of my old self. I was so insecure, I couldn’t make the simplest of decisions. I was once this funky, free, bohemian woman, and I was a paler version of my former self. To him, I wasn’t thin enough, I wasn’t quite enough, and I’m sure how it was not normal enough. And his constant judgment of me started to seep into how I viewed myself.
So I threw myself into therapy, and there I started to see a pattern of being silent. Whether it be my dyslexia or growing up with a closeted lesbian mother in the more homophobic era of the 80s and 90s, or being an objectified female where my face mattered, but not my words. But I had to find that voice in order to lead that relationship.
And eventually, I saw my role as a passive accomplice, and I didn’t want to be anybody’s idea of normal if normal existed, and hallelujah, it doesn’t, right? I thankfully ended that relationship, but afterwards I wanted to sucker punch myself, forever wasting any time, and especially my responsibility, free 20s with him.
Finding the Silver Lining
So I keep reminding myself, and I reminded myself then that I gained a lot of gifts because I was in the relationship. And one of them was he helped me find that I had some brain cells to work with. I had developed this concept with my severe undiagnosed dyslexia that I wasn’t very smart. He was extremely bright and only treated me as such, so it healed a deep wound inside me.
And that had a domino effect in my life. I read a small library worth of books, I got my passport stamped around the world, and I decided to face academia again and have the courage to go to graduate school and fulfill a lifelong dream of mine to be a counselor.
So things weren’t all that bad. And he was a bit more rigid. And I was a wild child wearing wigs and going to Burning Man and watching the sun rise after hitting the clubs all night long. Sorry, mom, now the news is out.
And I don’t know if I loosened him up, that’s one thought I had, but I do know I introduced him to his life’s passion, photography. So we both left with parting gifts. And by far, this was the most unhealthy relationship I’ve ever had. But the one I learned the most from. In that darkness, I continued to evolve into the person I meant to be. And I’m still developing.
Conclusion
During preparing for this speech, I felt really guilty for taking somebody else’s spot. I thought the committee made a huge mistake. I was like, “Did someone bribe them?” But I know that this is a place I go to when I’m insecure because a blind spot was illuminated because I was in a relationship.
So when you feel broken and you question if love is worth the pain, look at your growth. Try to find the metaphorical gifts that make your soul rich.
Appease me for a moment and dream with me. Dream with me of a world where none of us have any doubt that we are loved. And that we know that heartbreak is just part of life. And that we’ll go out and crash and burn and we’ll get our hearts recharged and we’ll go back out there again. And maybe someday a place where we will not break from breakups, but we’ll be held together by our friends, our rituals, and encouraged to be the ever-evolving souls we are meant to be.
